Justus Lipsius

The humanist and classical scholar Justus Lipsius (Joost Lips)
(1547–1606), described by his admiring correspondent Michel de
Montaigne as one of the most learned men of his day (Essays
II.12), was the founding father of Neostoicism, a key component of
European thought in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

His famous and widely read Stoic dialogue De constantia was
an attempt to combine Stoicism and Christianity, producing a new
philosophy that would help individuals to live through the difficult
period of the religious wars and establishing constancy as
the most important of the virtues.

Lipsius’s lifelong project was to transform contemporary moral
philosophy through a new reading of the Roman Stoic philosopher
Seneca, while also revitalizing contemporary political practice by
drawing on the insights provided by the Roman historian Tacitus.
Before publishing his major edition of Seneca’s philosophical
writings in the year before his death, he wrote two theoretical
treatises on Stoicism, which provided the philosophical foundation for
a new interpretation of Seneca and a new understanding of Stoic
doctrines.

1. A Life of Humanist Scholarship

Lipsius’s changes of religious allegiance, which distressed
contemporary scholars and made him the target of relentless criticism,
have been a crucial factor in determining his reputation up to the
present day. To understand his motives and his philosophical
achievements, we must examine the biographical facts.

Born a Catholic on 18 October 1547 in Overijse, a small town between
Brussels and Louvain, Lipsius first studied in Brussels (primary
school, Kapelleschool; 1553–1557) and Ath (Latin School,
1557–1559). He then pursued his studies with the Jesuits in
Cologne (at the Bursa Nova Tricoronata, 1559–1564), returning to
Louvain where he matriculated at the university on 14 August 1564.
There he studied law, while also attending courses by Cornelius
Valerius, professor of Latin, at the Collegium Trilingue, a humanist
institution of Erasmian inspiration; among his fellow students were
Ludovicus Carrio, Janus Dousa, Martin-Antonio Del Río, Andreas
Schott. Lipsius was already engaged in the emendation and critical
examination of Latin texts, especially of Cicero, Propertius and
Varro; and, as early as 1566, he put together three books of
Variae lectiones (“Variant Readings”), which were
published in 1569 at Antwerp. He embarked on an extended academic
journey to Italy, ending in Rome, where he became private secretary to
Cardinal Granvelle, to whom he had dedicated his Variae
lectiones, and where he made the acquaintance of leading
humanists such as Marc-Antoine Muret, Fulvio Orsini, Paolo Manuzio and
Guglielmo Sirleto.

After his journey to Rome, where he was able to examine ancient
monuments and consult unique manuscripts in the Vatican Library and
other well-stocked private libraries (1568-1570), he returned to
Louvain to continue his legal studies. Fleeing the political and
religious conflict in the Low Countries, Lipsius went to visit his
friend Carolus Langius (Charles de Langhe) in Liège (1571)
— Langius would become Lipsius’s master of Roman Stoic
philosophy in the dialogue De constantia.

In the spring of 1572, Lipsius moved to Vienna where he was introduced
to the humanist circle at Maximilian’s court, which included
Ogerius Busbequius, Joannes Sambucus and Stephanus Pighius. In October
Lipsius obtained the chair of history at the Lutheran University of
Jena. He also completed his edition of Tacitus, which he dedicated to
Emperor Maximilian II and in which the Annals were
distinguished from the Histories for the first time. He left
Jena briefly in 1573 to marry Anna van den Calstere in Cologne and
then for good in 1574, when he returned to the Low Countries.

After a sojourn in Overijse and Louvain, he was invited to the
Calvinist University of Leiden by Janus Dousa in September 1577. He
referred to his Leiden period (from 1578 to 1591) the most productive
of his scholarly life. Among the numerous writings he published during
these years the most important were De constantia and the
Politica.

Due to the bitter controversies arising from the publication of the
Politica, Lipsius decided to return to the Catholic Southern
Low Countries, settling first in Spa and then Liège
(1591–1592). Having re-embraced the Catholic faith of his youth,
he moved in August 1592 to Louvain, where he accepted the chair of
history at the university and the chair of Latin at the Collegium
Trilingue. In this final period of his life he prepared his edition of
Seneca and his treatises on Stoic doctrines and physics. He also
continued to write on classical scholarship and political philosophy,
publishing antiquarian treatises on the cross (De cruce,
1593), the Roman army (De militia Romana libri quinque,
1595), Roman fortifications and armaments (Poliorceticon sive de
machinis, tormentis, telis libri quinque, 1596), the grandeur of
Rome (Admiranda sive de magnitudine Romana libri quatuor,
1598), ancient libraries (De bibliothecis syntagma, 1602),
the Roman goddess Vesta and the Vestal virgins (De Vesta et
Vestalibus syntagma, 1605), as well as Monita et exempla
politica (“Political Advice and Examples,” 1605), an
extended historical-philosophical “mirror of princes,”
intended as a sequel to his Politica. In addition, Lipsius,
appointed Royal Historiographer in 1595, was asked to write devotional
tracts in honor of the Holy Virgin of Halle and Scherpenheuvel, thus
supporting the religious and political agenda of the Archdukes Albert
and Isabella: the Diva Virgo Hallensis: Beneficia eius et miracula
fide atque ordine descripta (1604) and Diva Sichemiensis sive
Aspricollis, nova eius beneficia & admiranda (1605).

Lipsius saw to the publication of his own letters, bringing out three
collections or Centuriae (since each contained 100 epistles),
in his lifetime, the first of which appeared in Leiden in 1586. He
prepared another Centuria for posthumous publication by his
executor Joannes Woverius, who, together with his fellow-executors,
added a fifth Centuria postuma. From this vast
correspondence, it is apparent that Lipsius was a central figure in
the Republic of Letters of his day, renowned for his philological
skills, his historical knowledge and his search for a new type of
humanitas (civilized and humane conduct) suited to the
troubled times in which he lived. The inventory of Lipsius’s
letters includes more than 4,300 items and 700 correspondents, among
them not only Montaigne, but also such distinguished scholars as Isaac
Casaubon, Henri Estienne, Joseph Scaliger, Sir Philip Sidney, Paolo
Manuzio, Fulvio Orsini, Joannes Sambucus, Joachim Camerarius, Benito
Arias Montano, Francisco de Quevedo, Abraham Ortelius, Hugo Grotius,
and Philip Rubens, brother of the artist Peter Paul, who immortalized
Lipsius in his painting The Four Philosophers (now in the
Palazzo Pitti in Florence). Most of the letters reflect
Lipsius’s friendships, thoughts, feelings, teachings and
attempts at self-presentation. Yet his letter collections were also
meant as an extension of his humanist scholarship and his Neostoic
intellectual program.

According to his Catholic biographers, Lipsius died in Louvain
“a devout Catholic” during the night of 23 to 24 March
1606. They recount that he asked his wife to present his fur-trimmed
robe to the statue of the Sedes Sapientiae in the church of
St Peter at Louvain and that, surrounded by three Jesuits, he
displayed “the constancy of Christian strength”
(Christiani roboris constantia): when encouraged to think of
the consolations of Stoicism, he replied: “those things were
vain … this [pointing to a crucifix] is true endurance”
(illa sunt vana … haec est vera patientia).
Lipsius’s return to the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church in
1591 had prepared the way for this symbolic and propagandistic use of
his scholarly genius and image.

2. De constantia

The young Lipsius began his philological study of Seneca, like that of
Tacitus, during his stay in Rome in 1569. It was Marc-Antoine Muret
who first stimulated his interest in Seneca and Roman Stoicism, giving
rise to a life-long obsession which would alternate between philology
and philosophy. Lipsius’s philosophical interest in Roman
Stoicism led to the publication of his highly successful Senecan
dialogue, set in the midst of the violent religious and political
struggles of the Netherlands, De constantia in publicis malis
(“On Constancy in Times of Public Calamity”, 1583/4). This
was his earliest attempt to combine Stoicism and Christianity in order
to create a new philosophy which would help individuals to live
through the difficult period of civil and religious wars which were
tearing Northern Europe apart.

A closer look at Lipsius’s first Neostoic work reveals that
De constantia was the manifesto of a humanist who was
convinced that he had found in Seneca’s philosophy both a
consolation and a solution to the public calamities which he and his
contemporaries were enduring. From Seneca’s De vita
beata (15.8), Lipsius takes the leitmotif: “we are
born into a kingdom where obedience to God is true liberty”
(De constantia I.14). After defining God, providence and
fate, he comes to necessity (necessitas), the logical
conclusion of their co-operation: everything which is governed by fate
happens by necessity (De constantia I.19). The most obvious
example of this natural necessity is the decay and destruction of all
temporal things (De constantia I.15–16).

While consoling his readers, Lipsius does not deny the hubris of
power, the atrocities of history or the cruelty of tyrants and
emperors. Yet he tries to encourage his readers to adopt an attitude
of constancy by listing a long series of divinae clades
(divinely sanctioned disasters): horrifying examples from history
meant to illustrate the utility of divine punishment and to
demonstrate that evils such as earthquakes, pestilence, war and
tyranny are part and parcel of the human condition — indeed, of
God’s plan for the preservation and improvement of the whole
world. Moreover, he argues, the evils of the present time are neither
particularly grave nor worse than those which existed in the past:
“Just as work becomes easier if shared by more people, so too
does sorrow” (De constantia II.26).

The truly wise man is therefore expected to accept the law of
necessity (lex necessitatis) with steadfastness and mental
fortitude While realizing “that man is but a dream of a
shadow,” he should show disdain for the course of human events
by cultivating constantia: “the upright and immovable
mental strength, which is neither lifted up nor depressed by external
or accidental circumstances” (De constantia I.4). The
mother of this constancy is patience, which is governed by reason.
Reason (ratio) — as opposed to false opinions —
is nothing other than a true judgment concerning things both human and
divine. It is this internal transformation — based on the
essential Stoic attributes of reason, freedom from the emotions,
patience in adversity and subjection to God’s will — which
makes it possible to live contentedly amid the inevitable decay and
turmoil of the world.

So, “enveloped by the mist and clouds of opinion” (De
constantia I.2), we must never stop attempting to conquer our
passions and emotions (adfectus) — desire, joy, fear
and pain (cupiditas, gaudium, metus and
dolor) — and our false opinions by means of reason. Not
only do emotions disturb the equilibrium of the soul and impede
constancy, they are false and dangerous, since they can upset the
detachment needed by the wise man(sapiens). Consequently, it
is necessary “to steel our mind and so temper it that we may
achieve peace in the midst of turmoil and tranquility in the midst of
conflict” (De constantia I.1). If reason, the lawful
ruler of our mind, can conquer our passions and false opinions, we
will be able to face public and private evil with true constancy. Due
to three emotions, however —simulatio or deception,
pietas or patriotism, and miseratio or pity for
misfortunes of others — we all carry war around within
ourselves. Even worse, what appears to us to be a virtue is actually a
vice, for thinking that we suffer on account of the sufferings of our
country causes us to grieve for our self and our property, while pity
for the sufferings of others is unworthy of a wise man. We must
therefore obey the Stoic injunction to extirpate all these harmful
emotions.

The dialogue between Lipsius and his old friend Langius — cast
in the role of the Stoic sapiens who had achieved mastery
over his emotions by reason — was clearly intended to provide
readers with something simpler than contemporary philosophy, which
Lipsius criticized for its excessive subtlety, and to establish
constancy as the chief virtue. Lipsius’s De constantia
thus has a different focus from the Senecan treatise De constantia
sapientis (“On the Constancy of the Wise Man”), on
which it was ostensibly modeled; for in chapters 1–12 of Book I
Lipsius puts forward the virtue of constancy as a remedy for the
turmoil of the times and urges readers to detach themselves completely
from all feelings which might lead to any sort of emotional
involvement in the political and religious wars which were raging
around them.

Nevertheless, he did not counsel withdrawal from public affairs and
retreat into private life. Stoics and Christians were cosmopolitans,
whose “true native land was the heavens.” They
“should be good citizens in order to be good men” (De
constantia 1.12) and, as such, yield to God’s plan for
mankind and to the immutable power of providence.

The result of Lipsius’s repackaging of Stoic apatheia
(emotionlessness) as an appropriate antidote to the religious and
political passions of his day and of his transformation of Stoic fate
into Christian divine providence (by subordinating fate to God instead
of vice versa) was that his brand of Neostoicism became as suitable
for Christians as the Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas and the
Platonism of Marsilio Ficino.

Although De constantia was not Lipsius’s most
systematic or theoretical treatment of Stoic ethics, but rather a book
of practical psychology, a manual for wise living, it acquired a
leading position in European thought. Going through more than eighty
editions between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, over
forty in the original Latin and the rest in translations into a wide
range of modern European languages, the treatise, which embodied
elements of militant Calvinism together with arguments on free will
used by the Jesuits, became common cultural property during the
Baroque period, influencing scholarship, poetry and art up to the
Enlightenment.

3. Politica

Lipsius’s Politicorum sive Civilis doctrinae libri sex
(“Six Books on Politics or Civil Doctrine”, 1589),
dedicated to Count Maurice of Nassau, can be considered a sequel to
De constantia: “just as in On Constancy we
instructed citizens how to endure and obey, so here [we instruct]
those who rule how to govern,” Lipsius stated in “The
Letter to the Reader.” In the same way that the citizen had to
follow reason (ratio), the ruler had to apply reason and
political virtue to government, but first of all to his own life,
since if “he desires to subject all things to himself, he should
subject himself to reason first.”

Drawing on a wide range of classical sources, above all Tacitus,
Lipsius’s subject in the treatise was specifically how to rule
principalities. While political thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle and
many others had already written on this topic, they had dealt with it
more generally, not in relation to principalities. The one important
exception was Machiavelli, who “led his prince along the right
way to the temple of virtue and honor,” but “while
pursuing the path of utility, he wandered from the royal road.”
The humanist Lipsius intended to be practical but to avoid any
concrete and contemporary applications of the general principles he
set out.

Lipsius constructed his book from quotations of ancient writers
— in itself a humanist tour de force, enabling him to
show off his vast knowledge of classical literature. Montaigne
described it as “a learned and carefully woven fabric.”
Yet, although the treatise has been characterized as not much more
than a compendium of quotations, Lipsius himself emphasized that the
Politica was not a mere compilation. Since he had imposed
order on the quotations, he expressed his own thought, following the
strict rules of Ramist logic, through the authority of the ancients.
Moreover, in addition to classical writers, Lipsius drew on medieval
and Renaissance political philosophers, including Thomas Aquinas, the
Spanish scholastics, Jean Bodin and Niccolò Machiavelli.

The Politica, divided into six books, was concerned with the
construction of civil life and the state in an ethical context. The
first book was devoted to an analysis of two necessary conditions:
virtue (virtus), which requires piety and goodness; and
prudence (prudentia) which is dependent on use and historical
memory. The second book deals with the virtues of the prince as well
as the purpose of government and its various forms. Civil concord, a
central issue for Lipsius, requires everyone to submit to the will of
the prince, who himself must have both virtue and prudence in order to
achieve this concord. In the third book Lipsius, in line with medieval
and humanist mirrors of princes, focused on the distinctive virtue of
the prince: political prudence (prudentia civilis), for which
he depends both on himself and the advice of others (officials,
councilors, military commanders). A prudent prince must be surrounded
by prudent advisors. In the fourth and by far the longest book, the
prince’s own prudence (both civil and military), which must be
carefully developed in the light of experience, is discussed. Two
types of civil prudence — the first concerned with divine
matters and the second with human affairs — are set out in the
rest of Book IV. Lipsius’s controversial chapters on the
difficult relationship of the state to the church and on religious
toleration — in his view, peace and unity could only be achieved
if just one religion was allowed in any particular political community
— provoked sharp attacks both from Protestants, especially Dirk
Volckertsz. Coornhert, and from the Roman Inquisition, which in 1590
placed the Politica on the Index of Prohibited Books.
According to Lipsius, the prince should not intervene in the internal
affairs of the church, much less meddle with doctrinal issues: he had
no “rights in sacred matters” (ius in sacra;
Politica, IV.2). It was, however, his right and, indeed, duty
to secure the unity of the church, since religious discord inevitably
led to civil disruption and war. Those religious dissidents who were
responsible for the strife that was tearing Europe apart deserved no
mercy: “Burn, cut — for the whole body [of the state] is
of greater value than some of its limbs” (Lipsius took this
provocative medical metaphor from Cicero). On the other hand,
dissidents who practiced their faith quietly and peacefully were to be
treated with toleration. In Books V and VI of the Politica,
which dealt with military prudence, Lipsius explored issues concerning
defense, the just war (bellum iustum), discipline and civil
conflicts.

Lipsius’s Politica, written in the heated atmosphere of
civil wars and radical attempts at religious reform, can be seen as an
attempt to produce a synthesis between the traditional mirror of
princes, a popular genre among humanists, and Machiavelli’s
Prince. Lipsius was a self-proclaimed supporter of monarchy
and a moderate form of absolutism, at least when based on Stoic
virtues. The way to prevent a monarch from abusing his power was not
to threaten him with revolt or tyrannicide, but rather to educate him
thoroughly in Stoic ethics. Lipsius’s ideal monarchy was not
based on amoral despotism or Machiavellian power. Its foundation was
instead Neostoic moral philosophy, whose precepts and doctrines would
ensure that unruly emotions were governed by reason.

Lipsius’s own traumatic experiences in the bloody civil wars of
his day surely explain, at least in part, his obsessive concern for
unity in both state and religion, the secular authority
(auctoritas) of the prince and the disciplined obedience of
the citizenry. Decades before Thomas Hobbes, Lipsius placed order and
peace, which alone could guarantee political stability, far above
civil liberties and personal freedom. That is why Lipsius, writing in
Calvinist Leiden, argued in favor of a more powerful central authority
in order to control revolutionary forces in an efficient way. The
prince’s authority must be as strong as possible, reinforcing
his subjects’ opinion of him. He has at his disposal three
instruments of power (praecipua vis imperii) to achieve this:
his commands, his actual power (depending on wealth, army, advisors,
alliances and God’s will) and, finally, his moral standards.
Voluntary obedience and common consent, together with the peace and
unity which they produce, are secured by the efficient operation of
these three instruments (Politica IV.9).

Although the claim that Lipsius’s Politica
“launched the anti-Machiavellian tradition of the
Counter-Reformation” (Birely, 99) is no doubt exaggerated, it is
certainly true that the treatise found a wide audience and met with
immense success. More than Jean Bodin in his Six Books of the
Republic (1576) or Johannes Althusius in his
Politics Methodically Set Forth (1603), Lipsius dealt with
the issues which genuinely agitated his contemporaries. Even before
the Politica came off the presses in Leiden, Lipsius was
preparing himself for the criticism which he expected to encounter. In
a second edition, which appeared in 1590, he included some Breves
notae (“Brief Notes”) on the first three books; and a
year later he published Liber de una religione (“Book
on One Religion”), written in response to Coornhert’s
objections to his views on toleration. After returning to the Catholic
Southern Low Countries, Lipsius rewrote the Politica. This
“Catholic” version, published in Antwerp in 1596 and
supplied with additional notes, was an attempt to meet the criticisms
of the Roman Church. Although both versions circulated throughout
Europe, crossing confessional boundaries, the Politica was
most enthusiastically received in France, Germany and Spain. During
the reign of Henri IV alone, the Politica was published ten
times in French translation. The treatise exerted a notable influence
on Pierre Charron, author of De la sagesse (On
Wisdom, 1601), Cardinal Richelieu, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria and
the Count-Duke Olivares, among many others.

4. Later Stoic Writings

Lipsius’s De constantia whetted the appetite of his
contemporaries for further works on ancient moral philosophy. As
Montaigne, one of its admiring readers, wrote:

How I wish that, during my lifetime, someone like Justus Lipsius (the
most learned man left, a polished and judicious mind …), had
the health, the will and sufficient leisure to compile an honest and
careful account which listed by class and by category everything we
can find out about the opinions of ancient philosophy on the subject
of our being and our morals; it would include their controversies and
their reputations, it would tell us who belonged to which school, and
how far the founders and their followers actually applied their
precepts on memorable occasions which could serve as examples. What a
beautiful and useful book that would be! (Essays II.12).

Lipsius did, in fact, go on to supply such an account, at least in
relation to Stoic thought. Fearing that his poor health would prevent
him from completing his edition and commentary on Seneca, Lipsius, at
the end of 1602, decided to publish beforehand his Manuductio ad
Stoicam philosophiam (“Guide to Stoic Philosophy”)
and Physiologia Stoicorum (“Physical Theory of the
Stoics”). A third work in this series, to be entitled
Ethica, was planned but never completed. In the two published
treatises, which came out in 1604, Lipsius attempted to reconstruct a
coherent philosophical system of Stoicism, focusing, as he had done in
De constantia, on its compatibility with Christian
doctrine.

5. Manuductionis ad Stoicam philosophiam libri tres

Although Lipsius made a thorough study of all the ancient Stoic
sources available to readers of his time, the Manuductio was
not a mere anthology of quotations. Using his well-honed skills as a
classical scholar, he meticulously analyzed the philological,
historical and philosophical aspects of Greek and Roman Stoic
writings, relying primarily on Seneca and Epictetus, but also taking
into account Cicero, Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius and a host of other
ancient writers, including Plato, Philo Judaeus, Apuleius,
(pseudo-)Hermes Trismegistus and Sextus Empiricus. We also find
quotations from Scriptures and from a variety of Greek and Latin
Church Fathers — Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Minucius
Felix, Lactantius, Eusebius and St Augustine —together with
later Christian writers such as Orosius and Isidore of Seville.
Lipsius drew on these thinkers not only because of the historical or
philosophical information which they provided on Stoic philosophers
and their doctrines but also to demonstrate the uninterrupted interest
in Stoic philosophy of later centuries.

The Manuductio starts with a history of the most important
philosophical schools which existed in antiquity, followed by a
discussion of the origin and succession of the various Stoic schools,
their different views on the definition and parts of philosophy. He
then comes to the Stoic conception of the truly wise man. Taking his
cue from Aristotle (Metaphysics 982a), Lipsius asserts that
the main characteristic of the wise man is that “he knows in a
sense all the instances that fall under the universal”
(Manuductio II.8). The wise man (sapiens) —
whom, following the Greek Stoic Panaetius, Lipsius regarded as in a
state of progress (proficiens) — will therefore study
the physical phenomena and their causes, learning the laws of nature
and their relationship to the rules of conduct in order to discover
the nature of good and evil. If ethical precepts are to lead to
wisdom, they must be reinforced by general doctrines and moral
training. Contrary to the Stoic belief that both God and nature need
to be comprehended by the use of reason, Lipsius — embracing
here a Platonic epistemology more in line with Christianity —
saw the understanding of God and his works as a divine gift
(Manuductio II.10). The road to wisdom, however, can only be
discovered by following the rules of conduct laid down by nature. This
truth must be deduced by reasoning, which explains Lipsius’s
elaborate account of the Stoic theory of knowledge. Both philosophical
doctrines and moral precepts are necessary and complementary to one
another for an appreciation of the virtues and as guides to the good
life. Without a Stoic understanding of the world and of the supreme
good (summum bonum), life cannot be lived happily. According
to Lipsius (who quotes Seneca’s De vita beata), living
happily is the same as living according to nature (Manuductio
II.15).

Lipsius devotes considerable attention to this important Stoic dictum.
Because there were only a few extant ancient testimonies, confusion
arose as to the precise meaning of man’s supreme good. Even
Stobaeus had acknowledged that “to live according to
nature” could be the same as “living according to the
Good” and “living well.” Lipsius correctly
understood that ‘living in accordance with nature’ was
equivalent to “living according to virtue,” so that the
goal was harmony with nature, with the universal law of the world and
with the particular rational nature of man. In his Christianized
reading of Stoic ethics, however, Lipsius adopted the more religious
phrasing of Seneca and Epictetus, so that “living according to
nature or virtue” became “living according to right
reason,” which the Stoics identified with Zeus or God,
“the lord and ruler of everything” (Manuductio
II.16, referring to Diogenes Laertius VII.88). Consequently, the wise
man was the one who obeyed God.

Having quoted the same passage in De constantia (I.14), in a
similarly religious vein, Lipsius once again asserted, with his
“Christian” Seneca, that “we are born into a kingdom
where obedience to God is true liberty” (Manuductio
III.12). Here, however, he explained why the ancient Greek Stoic
Cleanthes could rightly say that our common, universal nature is God
himself. If man is to obey his own nature, Lipsius argued, he must not
oppose the universal laws of human nature; and these laws are dictated
by the reason or logos which the Stoics equated with God.

Reason, for Lipsius, is a constituent part of the nature which will
lead man to a life of virtue (Manuductio II.17). Not
surprisingly, however, he replaces the Stoic logos with the
Christian logos or “Word of God” from the Gospel
of St John. Our own individual natures, as parts of nature or God,
function in the same way as do souls in the human body: they are God
dwelling in the human frame (Manuductio II.19). By
identifying the Stoic logos with the Christian God, Lipsius
is able to conclude, along with Cicero and Clement of Alexandria, that
the Stoic supreme good is equivalent to faith in God. Virtue and
wisdom come from the source of all knowledge: God. The Platonic
contemplation of the Good and the Stoic exploration of the
relationship of individual to universal nature are both tantamount to
the study of God and his logos, Christ. Therefore, the virtue
which the Stoics regard as the summum bonum is the right
attitude towards God; and this virtue is the only way to achieve the
good life (Manuductio II.19).

Starting from the Stoic dictum that the summum bonum consists
of virtue alone and that only virtue is good, Lipsius maintains,
following Seneca (Letter LXXI.4), that the supreme good must
also be honestum or morally honorable, and that it is limited
to the soul, the rational part of man (Manuductio II.20). If
everything is judged in relation to the standard of its own good, this
standard in man is reason. A man whose soul possesses reason has
complete control over good and evil. In contrast to the views of the
Platonists and Peripatetics, Seneca considers virtue to be sufficient
on its own for the honorable life, and for the virtuous life, man
needs to be concerned solely with his own conduct. Like Seneca’s
sapiens, Lipsius’s wise man,having control over
himself, chooses external things only when they are in accordance with
nature and, as such, morally honorable. External things are good
because the wise man, in his prudence and virtue, has selected them.
Choosing rationally among things which are natural but indifferent
with respect to happiness is the foundation of true virtuous action.
Because only that which is perfect by nature can be called the good
— just as the summum bonum is located in God, who is
perfect — the good does not exist in man until both he and his
reason are perfected (Manuductio II.22, referring to Seneca,
Letter CXXIV).

For all his devotion to the Stoics, Lipsius presented a rather
eclectic account of their moral philosophy, cutting and trimming as
religious orthodoxy required, since by no means all Stoic teachings
were compatible with Christianity. It was for this reason that he
rejected the Stoic doctrine of ethically indifferent actions
(Manuductio II.23). It also explains why he embraced some of
the Stoic paradoxes, such as the notion that a kingdom should please
the wise man no more than slavery (Manuductio III.12), which
reinforced Christian humility, while rejecting others, such as the
Stoic dictum that the wise man was, by his own decision, at liberty to
take his own life (Manuductio III.22–23), which was
blatantly opposed to Christian belief.

Physiologiae Stoicorum libri tres

Central to Lipsius’s insight into Stoic philosophy was his
perception that its ethics and physics were inseparable: it was not
possible to live one’s life in accordance with nature, as Stoic
ethics demanded, without a full knowledge of the physical workings of
nature. He develops this theme most fully in the companion piece to
the Manuductio, the Physiologia Stoicorum.

In this treatise Lipsius attempts not only to reconstruct Stoic
natural philosophy in detail, following the traditional didactic order
of the doxographical tradition, but also to reassert its importance
for Stoic ethics and theology. Here again the main burden of
Lipsius’s work is to explain away conflicts between Stoic
physics and Christianity or, failing that, to remove unresolved
contradictions from his Christianized, Neostoic natural philosophy. To
achieve this goal, he employs three different techniques for dealing
with problematic Stoic doctrines: interpreting them allegorically,
finding similarities with Christian beliefs and imposing Neoplatonic
“corrections” on them.

Lipsius made his intentions clear right from the start. Endorsing the
Stoic position that the study of nature and its workings was an
indispensable part of philosophy, he cited the well-known statements
of Plato (Theaetetus 155D) and Aristotle
(Metaphysics 982b) that amazement was the motive force of
philosophy (Physiologia I.2). In addition, he maintained that
the study of higher matters, such as the true nature of God and the
universal laws of nature, could serve as an antidote to involvement in
petty quarrels — the same role which, in De constantia,
he had assigned to constancy and the Stoic mastery of the emotions by
reason.

Lipsius connected the Stoic definition of nature found in Diogenes
Laertius (VII.156), “a craftsmanlike fire proceeding to
create,” to the one provided by Stobaeus (Eclogues
I.29) and Plutarch (in fact he quotes Aetius; cf. SVF II.1027):
“God is a craftmanlike fire proceeding methodically to create
the world, and containing within itself all the seminal reasons; then,
in accordance with these, everything is constructed by fate”
(Physiologia I.6).

According to Lipsius, this showed that the Stoics believed the world
to be the principal creation of God, in whom were contained the seeds
of fate which controlled the birth of individual things. This fire or
God, containing the seminal reasons (rationes seminales),
ideas or forms of all existing things, is a Lipsian innovation,
deriving from the Neoplatonic and Christian traditions (he quotes John
of Damascus, De orthodoxa fide 13). Lipsius compares this
notion to the biblical account of Moses seeing the light glowing in
the bush (Exod. 3:2) and the pillar of fire which leads the Israelites
through the wilderness (Exod. 14:19), and also to the burning tongues
of the Apostles (Acts 2:3; Physiologia I.6).

Lipsius is indebted as well to the Corpus Hermeticum, which
he frequently cites when dealing with the notion of Platonic ideas and
their relation to God. Arguing that God is not only the divine fire of
the Stoics but also the spiritus igneus (“fiery
breath”), he quotes Posidonius and Hermes Trismegistus, with the
aim of demonstrating that a similar view can be found in Christianity:
no one sees God, and yet everyone sees God daily in all things
(Physiologia Stoicorum I.7, citing Stobaeus,
Eclogues I.2.19 and Corpus Hermeticum XI.16). He
rejects, however, as incompatible with Christianity, the Stoics’
pantheistic equation of God with the world and their belief that the
divine principle is corporeal (Physiologia I.8).

Lipsius was nonetheless prepared to accept the view of God as the
world soul, which permeates every living thing (Physiologia
I.8–9). He identified fate with God’s providential reason
(Physiologia I.12) and adopted St Augustine’s view
(De civitate Dei V.8) that fate does not impinge in any way
on the free will of God (Physiologia I.12). Although fate
causes everything, not every action is a direct result of it. Human
beings thus preserve their moral liberty and responsibility in the
sphere of causae secundae (“secondary causes”).
Lipsius was a Christian thinker, as well as a Stoic one, and in this
capacity he drew on Aristotle’s De generatione
animalium (769a-773a) to explain the existence of evil in a world
created by a supremely benevolent God: deformed creatures and
monstrosities which seem to be contrary to nature are actually in
accordance with the overall plan of nature and divine providence
(Physiologia I.13).

If Lipsius did violence to the Stoic conceptions of matter, body and
God in order to keep faith with Christianity, he also violated certain
Christian teachings when defending the Stoic view of the soul as a
vital pneuma (“spirit” or “breath”;
Physiologia III.9, citing Diogenes Laertius VII.157). A more
detailed analysis of Stoic beliefs about the soul might have brought
to the surface embarrassing incompatibilities with Christian doctrine.
This would not have suited his selective approach to Stoicism, whose
purpose was to produce a perfect marriage of pagan and Christian
elements, which would serve to enhance the truths of Christianity.
However inelegant some of Lipsius’s “adaptations”
might seem, they belonged to the carefully considered program of a
humanist who, by promoting free will, virtue and social commitment,
based on a synthesis of Christian and Stoic ethics, wanted to achieve
an acceptable, unifying and practicable Christian
humanitas.

It should be emphasized that Lipsius did not seek to develop a new
philosophy but rather wanted to produce a better “understanding
of Seneca.” Nevertheless, it has been claimed that his
elucidation of Stoicism gave new meaning to concepts such as freedom,
determination, nature and reason, providence and God, and provided
European intellectuals with a new awareness of the world, rationality,
free will and individuality. It is well known that Lipsian Neostoicism
had a direct influence on many seventeenth-century writers —
Guillaume du Vair, Montesquieu, Bishop Bossuet and Pierry Bayle in
France; Francis Bacon and Joseph Hall in England; and Francisco de
Quevedo and Juan de Vera y Figueroa in Spain, to name but a few. One
could go further and say that no mention of Stoicism in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was complete without a reference
to Lipsius’s Manuductio, which became the classic work
on Stoicism for a century and a half. The most important histories of
philosophy — e.g., those by Georgius Hornius (1620–1670),
Thomas Stanley (1625–1678), Gerardus Johannes Vossius
(1577–1649), Joannes Jonsius (1624–1659), Henning Witte
(1634–1696), Johannes Franciscus Buddeus (1667–1729),
Burckhard Gotthelf Struve (1671–1738),Christoph August Heumann
(1681–1764) or Johann Jakob Brucker (1696–1770) —
all cite Lipsius’s historical and philosophical introductions to
Stoic physics and morals. His two systematic treatises on Stoic
philosophy, “pleading its cause before the court of
Christianity” (Spanneut, 239), found a prominent place in the
library of Spinoza and of other major philosophers of the early modern
era, including Descartes and Leibniz; and it was from Lipsius that
Locke first learned about Roman Stoicism.

Bibliography

Lipsius’s Works:

Complete Works

Opera omnia, published in two folio volumes at Lyons by
Horace Cardon in 1613. Unofficial edition published in Antwerp in 1614
in seven quarto volumes. Official edition published by Balthasar
Moretus in Antwerp in 1637 in four folio volumes, the last of which
contains a detailed index compiled by Franciscus Raphelengius. A
fourth edition, published in Wesel by André van Hoogenhuysen in
1675. This edition, in 8 octavo volumes, was reprinted by Olms Verlag
in Hildesheim in 2003.
(For a full bibliographical description of all editions of
Lipsius’s works, see Ferdinand Vander Haeghen and
Marie-Thérèse Lenger, Bibliotheca Belgica:
bibliographie générale des Pays-Bas, 5 vols
(Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1964), III: 883–1125).

––– (2008) “From Medieval to Early Modern
Stoicism”, in Continuities and Disruptions between the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Proceedings of the Colloquium held at
the Warburg Institute, 15–16 July 2007, ed. C. Burnett, J.
Meirinhos and J. Hamesse (Turnhout: Brepols): 1–23.

––– (2010) “Lipsius’s Neostoic
Reflections on the Pale Face of Death: from Stoic Constancy and
Liberty to Suicide and Rubens’s Dying Seneca,”
Lias: Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and Its
Sources, 37(1): 35–53.